With respect to the electric power grid, expensive peak power—electric power delivered during periods of peak demand—can cost substantially more than off-peak power. The electric power grid itself has become increasingly unreliable and antiquated, as evidenced by frequent large-scale power outages. Grid instability wastes energy, both directly and indirectly, for example, by encouraging power consumers to install inefficient forms of backup generation. Clean forms of energy generation, such as wind and solar, suffer from intermittency. Hence, grid operators are reluctant to rely heavily on these sources, making it difficult to move away from standard, typically carbon-intensive forms of electricity.
The electric power grid contains limited inherent facility for storing electrical energy. Electricity must be generated in a balanced fashion to meet uncertain demand, which often results in either over or under commitment or dispatch of generation, hence system inefficiency, system insecurity and power failures.
Distributed electric resources, en masse can provide a significant resource for addressing the above problems. However, current power services infrastructure lacks provisioning and flexibility that are required for aggregating a large number of small-scale resources (e.g., electric vehicle batteries) to meet medium- and large-scale needs of power services.
Classical dispatch of energy, (i) is cost based with centralized generation, (ii) is passive with static demand, (iii) has inaccurate parameters, (iv) has manual re-dispatch to relieve grid security violations, (v) uses ad-hoc forward scheduling that is disconnected from real time dispatch, (vi) designed only for rather normally inter-connected system operation and (vii) is limited in forensic analysis.
Thus, significant opportunities for improvement exist in the electrical sector. Real-time balancing of generation and load can be realized with reduced cost and environmental impact. More economical, reliable electrical power can be provided at times of peak demand. Power services, such as regulation and spinning reserves, can be provided to electricity markets to stabilize the grid and provide a significant economic opportunity. Technologies can be enabled to provide broader use of intermittent power sources, such as wind and solar.
There is a need for a methods and system tools for evaluating operational and financial performance that is used by dispatchers in power grid control centers associated with utility systems. There is a further need for methods and system tools for evaluating operational and financial performance for dispatchers in power grid control centers associated with utility systems using a comprehensive operating plan that applies after the fact analysis (after the fact analysis) for performance metrics, root-cause impacts and process re-engineering. There is yet another need for methods and system tools for evaluating operational and financial performance for dispatchers in power grid control centers associated with utility systems using after the fact analysis of past events and practices a scheduler engine that receives actual system and resource conditions from the relational database and processes it to calculate system performance. There are further needs to provide system tools for dispatchers in power grid control systems suitable for renewable resources and demand response. Outputs of many of the renewable resources do not follow traditional generation/load correlation but have strong dependencies on weather conditions, which from a system prospective are posing new challenges associated with the monitoring and controllability of the demand-supply balance. As distributed generations, demand response and renewable energy resources become significant portions of overall system installed capacity, a smarter system tool for dispatchers in power grid control systems for generation resources is required to cope with the new uncertainties being introduced by the new resources.